ABSTRACT
Europe in 1830 was still struggling to come to grips with the traumatic events that had embroiled her in the previous fifty years. Not only had the various states to accommodate vast structural changes-urbanization and industrialization on a new scale, unprecedented increase in population-but at the ideological level very many of Europe’s trials and torments had seemed to be selfinflicted. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 had confidently proclaimed that ‘men were born and remain free and equal’, enjoying ‘natural and imprescriptible rights’, with a collective identity in the nation which constituted the only legitimate source of political authority. But it was far from clear at the time, and became less clear as the revolution progressively unfolded, precisely how these principles might be translated into viable political institutions. What the Declaration provided was a series of rallying cries rather than closely argued political and constitutional proposals. And, indeed, nothing so terrified the established princes of Europe as the spectre of the French revolutionary armies demanding ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ for all men, everywhere. Such ideological motivation was a new phenomenon in 1789, comparable only with the hideous enthusiasm generated by earlier wars of religion. It cut across traditional territorial and dynastic claims, leading the political map of Europe to be redrawn according to new and uncertain standards.
